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TenCare received venture backing

Posted by admin at 3:27 PM on Jan 30, 2017

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TenCar, a women-owned medical devices and equipment company founded by Batavia native Georgann Carrubba, RN, today announced a new round of seed funding to continue building customer feedback and anticipated pilot production in 2017 for the company’s Choice Cap prosthetic appliance. Choice Cap has been designed for active-lifestyle colostomy and ileostomy patients.

The device provides patients with a simple but secure attachment method, which includes a lightweight, airtight, molded waterproof cap to be worn with or without the traditional soft inner pouch. The added protective barrier offers greater resilience to motion and activity, giving the wearer protection against leakage and escaped odors that are common in everyday activities.

Excell Partners, a venture capital fund based in Rochester that invests in seed and early stage high-tech startups in Upstate New York, and Launch NY, a seed stage funder that supports start-ups in 27 upstate New York counties will both invest $50,000 injecting $100,000 to support vital manufacturing and marketing activities for TenCar.

“We strongly believe our product will be life-changing for colostomy and ileostomy patients,” said Carruba. “These types of investments demonstrate we have a viable medical device that is close to being ready for pilot production. We are extremely grateful to Excell Partners and Launch New York for this investment in our company.”

“Governor Cuomo created the Minority and Women Owned Business investment fund, managed by Excell, to support entrepreneurs like Georgann” stated Rami Katz, Excell’s COO and a board member of TenCar. “Georgann’s commitment as a women entrepreneur, the chance to help over a million patients in the US and many more worldwide as well as the opportunity to create multiple jobs in Upstate NY makes TenCar a compelling investment opportunity.“

“This investment is exciting for many reasons not the least of which is that TenCar was founded by a nurse that saw an existing quality of life problem for ostomy patients and decided to invent a new product, ‘The Choice Cap System’,” said Marnie LaVigne, President and CEO of Launch NY. “Working with TenCar over the past two years illustrates the power of our venture development organization model that provides both mentoring and seed funding to accelerate market entry and growth.”

TenCar is the first start-up company to come out of the Genesee County Economic Development Center’s Innovation Zone which was launched in 2015. The company is interested in keeping manufacturing in Batavia.